Angolans Come Home to 'Negative Peace'

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: July 30, 2003

M'BANZA CONGO, Angola—
The journey took only a few hours a brisk, bumpy ride of 60 miles in the bed of a truck along a rutted, red dirt road. It was a nanosecond compared with the five years that Emmanuel Antonio, his wife and six children had spent as refugees across the border in Congo.

This was the ride home. As the convoy bounced along, Mr. Antonio's older children slumbered at his feet, oblivious to the bone-rattling bumps, and his 32-year-old wife, Madelena Merneza, cradled their youngest, Dani, 2, in her arms.

Finally setting foot again on Angolan soil, in the border town of Luvo, and waiting in line for a stamp from immigration officials, Mr. Antonio searched the moment for joy. He found only worry.

''My family must come home because we are Angolans,'' said Mr. Antonio, 38, a farmer. ''Now we have peace. We can only hope that there will be peace until the end.''

The civil war, which killed at least half a million Angolans and displaced more than a third of this country's 13 million people, has been over for more than a year. Since then, more than a million people like Mr. Antonio have returned to a country physically, politically and economically in ruins.

Their return is perhaps the clearest sign yet that the worst of Angola's troubles are over. But relief officials warn that some of Angola's biggest challenges may still lie ahead.

''People will discover their homes have been destroyed, roads are gone, schools are gone; very little is here,'' said Asfaha Bemnet, the United Nations official charged with overseeing the repatriation effort in M'banza Congo, about 200 miles northeast of Luanda, the capital. ''What we are telling the returnees is, 'Look, you are not returning to the land of milk and honey. But it is your home and it is good to go back. So roll up your sleeves, get to work and help rebuild your country.' ''

There is much to do. Last month the United Nations began bringing home the 400,000 refugees who remained in Congo, Namibia and Zambia.

The repatriation, which is voluntary, is a slow and complex process, impeded by bad roads, broken bridges and thousands of land mines.

The refugees return to a country where, according to the United Nations, 80 percent of people have no access to basic medical care. More than two-thirds have no running water. A whole generation of children has never opened a schoolbook. Life expectancy is less than 40 years. Three in ten children will die before reaching their fifth birthday.

In this fertile land where fields have lain fallow because of land mines sown liberally across the countryside, more than a million people need help from the World Food Program to avoid starvation. In the fighting, roads and bridges across the country were destroyed, stranding millions of people in isolated towns and villages.

Beyond the war's terrible physical toll, those who return face a country whose social fabric and national identity, not yet fully formed when the war broke out between rival liberation factions just after the Portuguese colonists departed Angola in 1975, are in tatters.

Last month rebels in the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, who have laid down their weapons, completed the transformation from guerrilla army to political party. They elected a leader to replace the charismatic but brutal Jonas Savimbi, whose death last year marked the end of their war with the quasi-Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or M.P.L.A., which rules the country.

But Angola remains a long way from having a fully functioning political system. The country has held only one election, in 1992, and government officials say 2005 is the earliest date possible for new elections.

''What we have in Angola now is negative peace,'' said Raphael Marques, a 31-year-old journalist and dissident who is the director of the Open Society Institute's Angolan office. ''It is the absence of conflict, yes. But it is peace without justice, peace without opportunity, peace without democracy. This is not a peace that promises much to the Angolan people.''

In the meantime, the Angolan government, led by President José Eduardo dos Santos, has vowed to use Angola's wealth of resources -- mostly raw material that fueled the war -- to tackle these problems.

It announced last month that foreign oil companies planned to invest billions to increase production. By 2020, Angola, the ninth ranking supplier to the United States, could triple its oil output to more than three million barrels a day.

The country also has diamonds, iron ore, phosphates, feldspar, bauxite, uranium and gold.

Few Angolans share in these riches. Foreign companies pay huge fees to the government to take the nation's wealth away, but little of it trickles down.

''The role of the state should be to take that wealth and apply it in ways that will benefit the people of Angola,'' said Justino Pinto de Andrade, head of the department of economics at the Catholic University of Angola in Luanda. ''The oil revenues go straight to the state budget, but the people see very little benefit.''

International groups that monitor how governments use the money they get from selling their natural resources accuse the Angolan government of mass corruption.